¹ SP, xxxii (1935), 235–239.

² In the second edition (Oxford, 1901), p. 19. In the third edition (Oxford, 1921) there is no such bold nor such concise statement of what remains his thesis, for which we owe a debt of ingratitude to the critics of his work who caused him to obscure it. Except where noted otherwise, references are nevertheless to the third edition.

³ Milton's Prosody, p. 35.

⁴ Masson, David, ed., The Poetical Works of John Milton, iii, 115. On the ground that it is absurd to omit vowels in reading, not recognizing the possibility of a system of fictional elisions, Masson partly denies the elisions: “When . . . I find flamed spelt flam'd, or Heaven spelt Eeav'n, or Thebes spelt Theb's, I take the apostrophe as an express direction to omit the e sound and pronounce the words as monosyllables; but I cannot accept the apostrophe as an elision-mark of precisely the same significance in the lines ‘Above th'Aonian Mount, while it pursues’ (P.L., i, 15), and ‘That led th'imbattelld Seraphim to Warr’ (P.L., i, 129),—for these reasons: (1) because the strict utterance thAonian and thimbattelld are comicalities now, which I cannot conceive ever to have been serious; (2) because such contracted utterances are quite unnecessary for the metre, inasmuch as the lines are perfectly good to the ear even if the word the is fully, but softly, uttered, according to prose custom; and (3) because I find the same elision-mark used in the old texts where it is utterly impossible that the total suppression of the e can have been meant.” Masson concludes, therefore, that because “what was agreeable to the English metrical sense in former generations is agreeable now” and “because Milton's poetry is a property which, by his own express intention, we may use and enjoy after our own habits and methods, the right way of scanning his verse is to read it freely and naturally as we should read verse of our own day, subject only to a few transmitted directions, and to register the actual results as well as we can in metrical formulae.” With this conclusion I cannot agree fully. However we read the verse, it seems to me to be well to scan it as Milton scanned it if we can. Masson finds it necessary to admit the principle of metrical substitution to the extent of admitting the trochee, the pyrrhic, the spondee, the anapaest, the tribrach, and the antibacchius into his scansion. Disyllabic substitutions we shall be concerned with later. Trisyllabic substitutions do not exist; where there is the appearance of them, they are rendered non-existent from the point of view of scansion by Milton's elisions.Google Scholar

⁵ Hamer, Enid, The Metres of English Poetry, pp. 92–93.Google Scholar

⁶ Words marked by asterisks are found on both lists.

⁷ Milton's Prosody, pp. 19–20.

⁸ This is true of words with the y-glide as well: higher, fire, etc. Bridges (20) cites power as a disyllable in Penseroso. “But in P.L. it is always a monosyllable.” A better instance of the elision of open vowels in spite of an intervening w is the word borrower (683). W, of course, is merely a written letter here, not spoken.

⁹ Milton's Prosody, p. 30.

¹⁰ In the manuscript is it is an insertion in 636, but it has nothing to do with the elision since it is compensated for by the deletion of ancient before Moly. Med'cinal is written as it stands, with the apostrophe, without correction.

¹¹ Bridges, Milton's Prosody, p. 47. This relaxation would admit the elision med'cinal which we have noted but not that in innocent.

¹² He is this line is an insertion for which the apostrophe perhaps compensates. There is no reason to believe, however, in the light of other occurrences of the same phenomenon, that Milton meant the apostrophe to replace the o instead of merely indicating the elision.

¹³ A glance at Donne's habits of elision (much freer, of course, than Milton's) makes it clear that Milton was not alone in including syllables in his verse with his fingers crossed, syllables that “didn't count” in his scansion. Thus Donne writes,

¹⁴ The es is written in a heavier line, and larger.

¹⁵ Milton also writes saw ‘em (294) where there is no elision—the 1645 edition reads saw them—and crosses out of to replace it with o‘ where there is none:

69. th'expresse resemblance o' the gods is changed.

In line 69, I think o' is preferred to of because it is a stressed syllable and the long, open vowel is more easily stressed than the complete particle, of.

¹⁶ Perhaps this preference is explained by the fact that in the manuscript hillie crofts is substituted for pastur'd lawns, since with the earlier reading the alternative did not exist and i'th was necessary. Nevertheless, Milton left i'th when he made the correction.

¹⁷ Verity, A. W., ed., Cornus, xlii. Verity also observes that the extrametrical syllable at the end of the line, the feminine ending, may be either a stressed or an unstressed syllable, and he cites line 633 as ending with a stressed extrametrical syllable:Google Scholar

633. Bore a bright golden flower, but not in this soil.

Here soil is, of course, not a light syllable, but nevertheless seems to me to be so from the point of view of scansion. After all, the question of whether or not a given syllable is stressed depends not upon its value relative to all the other syllables in the line, but to the syllables in the same foot. Here, as extrametrical, soil belongs to no foot and must be judged as stressed or unstressed in relation to the syllable-preceding it. The contrast between this soil and the soil of “another country” which the line expresses demands a heavy stress on this relative to which soil becomes unstressed. Thus in the second foot, bright, relative to the article which precedes it, is a stressed syllable. Nevertheless it must be scanned as unstressed in the foot to which it belongs (unless we admit the spondee as a Miltonic foot). The line should be scanned, I think, as follows:

ax xa xa xa xa (x).

Making it scan thus, however, does not make it a good line.

¹⁸ 617. As to make this relation?

Spir. Care and utmost shifts.

407. Of our unowned sister.

Eld. Bro. I do not, brother.

615. And crumble all thy sinews.

Eld. Bro. Why prethee Shepherd.

¹⁹ In Comus, Bridges (Milton's Prosody, p. 6) cites lines 66, 302, 599, 602, 662, 779; but he observes that ' in P.L. Milton disallowed the use of this syllable,” accounting for the extra syllable in lines where this rhythmical effect is maintained by elision. Of our scansion of line 66, “To quench the drouth of Phoebus, which as they taste,” Saintsbury says (ii, 227) “. . . others would resort to one of their acts of prosodic escamotage with an extra-metrical syllable at the caesura.” Saintsbury's disagreement in his History of English Prosody with the view presented here is complete.

²⁰ Other lines which might possibly be scanned in the same way, 718 and 829, for example, are made regular by elision.

²¹ Edition, m, 124–125.

²² It is worth observing, perhaps, that Milton uses it very rarely indeed where the line following begins with a reversed foot, since to use it in such circumstances is to obscure the line ending. In 482-483 we find the combination:

482. 2nd Bro. Me thought so too; what should it be?

Eld. Bro. For certain

483. Either some one like ourselves night-founder'd here.

But here the logic of the passage makes the last foot of 482, for certain, much more closely related to 483 than to the rest of 482, and the obscuring of the line end is a valuable device. In 689–690 it is put to similar use:

689. And timely rest have wanted, but fair Virgin

690. This will restore all soon.

La. 'Twill not false Traitor.

Here the half-line following belongs with 689 rather than with what follows in 690 ff. in logic and in dialogue. Of the other ten combinations of lines which perhaps ought to be scanned in this way (188–189, 209–210, 211–212, 228–229, 337–338, 350–351, 618–619, 696–697, 725–726, 844–845) only six may not about as well be scanned otherwise (337–338, 350–351, 618–619, 696–697, 725–726, 844–845). Of these, 726 is a marginal insertion in the manuscript and 690 a marginal substitution for a line which was without the feminine ending. All six are definitely end-stopped lines, so that the possibility of confusion does not exist.

²³ Mihon's Prosody, p. 38.

²⁴ Milton's Prosody, p. 70.

²⁵ Mrs. Hamer (Metres of English Poetry, p. 31) observes of Milton's tetrameter verse that he “hardly ever uses a full anapaest“ (she cites none) “but occasionally a glide-anapaest” as in the line

where iope queen is the “glide-anapaest,” in our terms an

xx a

iamb by the fiction of elision, or perhaps merely by contraction in this instance.

²⁶ In ten-syllable lines: borrow and sorrow are rhymed in the trimeter lines 8 and 9.

²⁷ In some of the rhymed decasyllables outside the manuscript Milton uses the double rhyme, perhaps especially freely in the Nativity Ode: unsufferable-table, sliding-dividing, thrilling-fulfilling, wearing-stearing, deceiving-leaving, ending-attending. But in the Nativity poem the stanza pattern has already definitely obscured the pentameter structure of the lines from which these rhymes are cited.

²⁸ See Percy Simpson, Proof-reading by English Authors of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries, pp. 96–97.

²⁹ One line independently cancelled in the cancelled version of the epilogue has only six syllables and is beyond scansion:

Ep. I, 4a. farre beyond the earths end.

It becomes in another position, line 1014,

Quickly to the earths greene end.

³⁰ Metres of English Poetry, 30–31.

³¹ These initial “light stresses” are but the most striking of the many examples of “theoretical stress” in the rhymed verse. The phenomenon is at least as common as in the blank verse, in the discussion of which we have already given it what attention it deserves. It is, of course, a common device in most English verse.

³² In lines 920–921, however,

we have an 8-8 couplet made over from an 8-10 couplet. There is ample justification here for a decasyllable in line 921, for it concludes Sabrina's speech while she frees the Lady from Comus's enchantment and constitutes Sabrina's farewell. That the decasyllable was deliberate and meant to give the closing effect which the terminal line of a passage does give when it is longer than the other lines (e.g. the Alexandrine of a Spenserian stanza), we may be sure from the fact that line 921 was begun two spaces farther to the left than the other lines on the manuscript page. The T is one of the few initial capitals in the text:

is the original reading. On is changed to in (by pen change) in her is cancelled, and the s is added to Amphitrite. The heaviness of the line with which these changes are made suggests that possibly they were made with a different pen from that of the rest of the page. More probably, I think, it was newly dipped for the purpose.

There is an excellent parallel for this original 8-10 couplet at the end of the Spirit's speech, lines 956–957:

where we have another capital letter and where line 957, like 921, is begun two spaces to the left of the rest of the text. The change is made in 920–921, I am sure, not because of the demands of prosody, but for the sake of the greater compression of the new line, Milton here preferring a rhetorical to a prosodic effect where it was a matter of prosodic choice, not of compulsion.

³³ The greater part of this analysis is taken from Saintsbury (History of English Prosody, ii, 220–221 and note 2, 220–221) except that it adopts the paragraphing defended in Till-yard's argument (E. M. W. Tillyard, Milton, Appendix E, pp. 385–386) on the paragraphing intended at lines 23–24, which changes the structure of the second and third paragraphs. According to Saintsbury's analysis, paragraph II has eight lines, 10, 10, 10, 10, 6, 10, 6, 10, rhymed oaabbcco, which Saintsbury describes as “two blank verse lines enclosing (as it were) three couplets.” The third paragraph, according to Saintsbury, has fourteen lines, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 7, 10, 10,10, rhymed aabcbcddeffegg. Tillyard points out that while according to his division “the second paragraph will agree with six others in ending with a couplet,” according to the other division, “the second paragraph will be unique in ending with one of the few unrhymed lines of the poem, and the third will be unique in beginning with a rhymed couplet, adding that “it is unconceivable that Milton should have begun it with a couplet any paragraph not itself composed of couplets, or that without some very good reason (not apparent here) for creating an effect of incompleteness he should have ended a paragraph with an unrhymed line.” Certainly Tillyard's division gives us two much better prosodie units than Saintsbury's.

The line recorded in Saintsbury's scheme as a “seven” is according to our scansion a “six.” Saintsbury describes it as “one of Milton's favourite catalectic octosyllables of optionally trochaic rhythm, though it may be taken as three feet only, and iambic.” It is line 33,

Temper'd to th 'Oaten Flute.

³⁴ Saintsbury, abcabddefegfg.

³⁵ Saintsbury fails to notice that the inserted flower-strewing passage comes into the paragraph on the d-rhyme, which therefore recurs in the last half of the paragraph.

³⁶ History of Prosody, ii, 219–221.